Posts by celtschk
How would the civilization discover electricity? That one is easy: There are animals in the sea that use electricity, like the electric eel. The underwater civilization would certainly be curious ...
A remark at the beginning: In a world where real-life vampires existed, there would certainly also grow a lot of myths about them. So we would have to distinguish between in-world real traits and i...
We are in a future where genetics has advanced to a point where arbitrary modifications can be done to living beings. Now a geneticist wants to make a flying human. That is, he wants to modify a hu...
Quantum computers operate differently than classical computers, and most importantly, doing measurements in the middle of a quantum computation process will disturb the process, and possibly lead t...
Actually I don't think you'll have that problem, for a simple reason: It is very unlikely that the planet will be a perfect match before doing some serious terraforming. Therefore after landing, pe...
When the sun started to behave strangely, astronomers were confused: The accepted solar model didn't at all predict this behaviour. Indeed, based on the new data it could quickly be shown that thei...
Well, let's see how such a field would work. The Hamiltonian equations are $$\frac{\mathrm d x_k}{\mathrm d t} = \frac{\partial H}{\partial p_k} \quad \frac{\mathrm d p_k}{\mathrm d t} = -\frac{\pa...
Never. The problem is not being able to simulate a human brain; that one I consider possible, and probably even achievable on affordable hardware at some time in the future. The problem is taking ...
The main function of clothing is to hinder the flow of heat. The last thing you want to do when putting people into cryogenic sleep is to hinder the flow of heat. Quite the opposite: You want to ha...
Hostile takeover. The other AI has lots of useful routines that your AI doesn't want to simply erase or leave unused. Instead it takes over the other AI, that is, incorporates all its routines, so...
The whole universe could be filled with air. That would also explain why the world isn't just in free-fall (and thus effectively gravitation-free): It is going at the limit speed where air resistan...
With many more than three colour receptors, our colour TVs, using just three colours for display, would not come even close to showing all the colours of the world. Moreover, LDCs inherently work w...
The ship started out as a generational ship to colonize some far-away planet. However, when approaching that planet, nobody wanted to be a colonist. They lived on the ship, their parents lived on t...
OK, here's the problem: I want to have a spaceship that is built for transporting large machines (in particular, heavy mining equipment). It does not and is not designed to leave space; transport d...
When reading "faster than light" one normally thinks of it as faster than the limit speed of relativity, which is the same as the speed of light in relativity, as the photon is massless and therefo...
tl;dr: No, it is not possible to have the force proportional to the product of the square roots of the charges. In an alternate universe there is a force known as the emotion force although the...
Well, the first obvious difference would be that the square-cube law would basically be replaced by a cube-tesseract* law. Since 4/3 is closer to 1 than 3/2, this means that there could be greater ...
The hair could contain a combination of chemical substances that changes colour after a given time. If the time needed for that process is long enough to allow the hair to significantly grow, but s...
Assume someone detonates a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb in space. Since in space there's no air, the bomb will behave differently than on Earth. In particular, there will not be an air pressure wav...
A recurring theme is how an artificial intelligence that was built with completely reasonable and positive goals instead does great harm to the world. However I'm now thinking about the reverse: A...
Let's do a bit of math. According to Wikipedia, the mass of the moon is $7.3\cdot10^{22}\,\rm kg$ and its average orbital speed is $1.0\,\rm km/s$. That means its kinetic energy is $3.7\cdot 10^{2...
It is definitely possible. Like for example the earth at the time of the dinosaurs. Quote (from relatively far down on the page): As the world entered the Cretaceous Period, Antarctica was very...
I'm making the following simplifying assumptions: No time travel, time dilation or other temporal effects through use of those technologies (basically, the travelling works as if there were an un...
Human language evolved for the interaction between humans. That may sound like a trivial fact, but it isn't: If there had not been social interaction between humans, humans would not have evolved l...
(Ab)Use Religion to control the people A properly maintained religion can get people to do almost everything, and can guide their behaviour. People have killed others in the name of their religion...
